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The Affordable Care Act has allowed young adults to remain independent with flexibility to “pursue other career development options,” researchers from Indiana University say in a new study. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

With unemployment high for young adults coming out of college in a tight job market, the Affordable care Act has allowed them to remain independent with flexibility to “pursue other career development options,” new research indicates.

A key aspect of the health law allows young adults, often college students, to stay on their parents’ health care plans until they are 26 years old. Such coverage went into effect in the fall of 2010 and was one of the first and most popular of the early benefits available under the health legislation that was signed into law in April of 2010 by President Obama.

“For young adults, it is unequivocally good because you have opened an additional avenue for them to consider,” Kosali Simon, a health economist in the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said of the law’s young adult coverage in an interview with Forbes. “You might decide that you can build your career in a different way. It allows young adults to pursue other options.”

For young adults, a tight labor market is particularly “harsh,” researchers said, because it’s generally toughest to get a job “on entry,” Simon said. In the past, these young adult job seekers may have taken a job they did not necessarily want or was not their first choice merely because they needed benefits.

“Parents have instilled in them that they have to find a job with benefits and it may have not been a job of their choosing,” Simon said. “They went into a field where ever they could find work.”

To come up with their analysis, the Indiana University researchers examined data from the US. Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program Participation “covering August 2008 to November 2011,” according to the report, which said researchers wanted to look at the group of young adults before, during and after it was implemented.

Researchers found that the Affordable Care Act was associated with a “reduced prevalence of full-time work” among young adults who were also working fewer hours by about three percent compared to before the law was enacted.

In the future, Simon said she and her colleagues hope to be able to uncover the kind of work these newly insured adults were doing and whether it was more entrepreneurial. “We don’t yet have the nature of their work,” she added.

Coverage for young adults is considered one of the earliest direct benefits to consumers of the Affordable Care Act because it has expanded coverage to more than three million people by some estimates.

In January of 2014, provisions of the health law will have a broader impact for 20 million to 30 million more Americans when subsidies will be available for people to buy private coverage from an array of health plans sold by insurers such as (AET), (CI), (HUM), (UNH) and various Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

In addition, researchers hope to find out what impact broader health coverage under health law will bring once the uninsured have access to individual coverage on exchanges that will debut this fall. Young people that in the past might have opted to go without health care coverage will then have to buy a plan or face a penalty.

“Future changes in the labor market could affect young adults’ ability to take advantage of reduced “job-lock” and move to new jobs,” the Indiana University study said. “Enforcement of the individual mandate could also affect the take-up decisions of those young adults who remain uninsured despite their parents being insured.”